"Hello Nana! How are you doing. Can't wait to see you and Auntie Mamie."

Nana and Auntie Mamie. Those are the names my partner, Amy, and I selected. "Not Grandma," I insisted. "And, Amy can't see herself as Grandma either."

"Options, Ma?" my son, Jed, queried.

"Nana for me. That was what I called my grandmother. And Mamie sounds fine for Amy."

Jed laughed. "So it's settled, Nana and Auntie Mamie."

"Of course, the child might have something else to say about it," daughter-in-law Danielle added.

The night they arrived we popped the video they'd brought with them into the VCR and watched a strange figure float across the screen. In slow frames it moved from one position to the next, bobbing, turning, turning, sucking, diving. In the room that night I felt that fetal figure tethered to its unknown and speechless parents; tethered not only by the umbilical cord but also by willfulness, Danielle's and Jed's. And by the power of an other-worldly image crafted not so much through the facts of biology as the forces of physics and the magnetism of electrons.

"Roz Petchesky was right," I said, aloud, half dazed.

"What?"

"Roz wrote an article years ago. Fetal Images. About these pictures' power to make you forget that a body, a living woman's body, surrounds and sustains the fetus."

Jed looked at me in disbelief. "What are you saying, Ma?".

"I'm saying seeing this video, I understand how easy it is to forget the woman. You almost can forget how complicated the whole thing is. It doesn't change my mind. It just means you can see, literally, how difficult that decision has always been."

"I know what you mean," Danielle interjected. "We wouldn't have wanted to see this if there had been any reason we would have wanted to abort."

A few months earlier, on February 14, 2001, Danielle and I had been two women among thousands of women, and some men, who filled Madison Square Garden to capacity to see Eve Ensler and a celebrity cast perform The Vagina Monologues. While Ensler read "I Was There in the Room," her ode to the birth of her grandchild, I watched Danielle wipe tears from her eyes. She definitely heard her clock ticking. For a year, she and Jed had been trying to get pregnant. No luck.

"It's costing so much to go through all these procedures. We can afford it; but sometimes I feel so conflicted. I am a feminist and I want to be pregnant." I hugged her. Different generation, same contradictions.

When I first became a mother in the late 1960s I was all of nineteen. Married, but only one month shy of my twentieth birthday, I gave birth to a baby boy and a responsibility for which I felt woefully unprepared. I had been an only child, reared by a "working mom," herself the only child of otherwise Irish Catholic parents. While other girls were babysitting, I was busy with forensics, writing briefs, practicing speeches and planning how to outwit prospective opponents against whom I would be slated in high school debate tournaments.

In 1969, when Jed was born, I entered motherhood on the edge of a decade that would call the whole enterprise deeply into question. Watching my own mother descend into a bottomless, alcoholic depression, I felt rudderless in a sea of mixed messages. On one corner of my desk, I kept a dog-eared copy of Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care and on the other, Shulamith Firestone's Dialectics of Sex. While Spock advised me to deal with my child's tantrum by offering some shiny object designed to delight and distract and, if all else failed, by picking up the bundle of fury and hightailing it to the nearest exit, Firestone reminded me that "the heart of woman's oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles."

Becoming politically or culturally active during that era meant, for me, facing the bewildering task of trying to combine mothering with activism in an era that invented the question of whether such a balancing act was possible or desirable. Despite the growing recognition in the women's movement that women's equality necessitated a new division of labor in the home, that insight carried with it no particular guidelines for how to find sanity before the revolution. Sure, there was Ti-Grace Atksinson's infamous manifesto--"woman removes sheets from dryer, man folds and stores them," etc. But few actually believed that would settle the emotional messiness of personal life once and for all.

Now, at the other end of my parenting career, I'm struck by a similar absence of mentors and road maps. I've had two husbands, two children, become a university professor, a lesbian, a grandmother, a writer. What have I learned? As a boomer in the latter part of middle age, I can tell you this: the balancing act seems no easier, just different. I've re-evaluated professional and personal priorities. I've reassessed my politics. I've wondered whether the utopian possibilities for which my generation struggled have dwindled or are being rejuvenated. My children have begun to have children. All this pushes me, along with others of my generation, to search for new rituals, new myths, new rhythms, and a new politics to guide our lives.

What will those be?

For many women of my generation, participating in second wave feminism was an electric, exhilarating, and, yes, confusing time. We worked to build a grass roots movement for child care as an educational equity issue in an era when Congress condemned national funding for child care as if it were a communist plot. That movement and its history now seem largely erased. We worked for welfare reforms and watched a Democratic President end a national program of support for families with dependent children. We worked to end war and imperialism and now find it difficult to negotiate the rising patriotic seas. We worked to free sex from sin, but also to end the degradation of women, which led to contradictory ideas about pornography and harassment and violence. And we struggled with questions about love and power: Can I be liberated and still have a loving, caring relationship?

Sometimes our answers were troubling. We wanted love and power and to use them both to build a new kind of home. We felt overwhelmed by the enormity of it all; overwhelmed and isolated, often by other women. Our politics didn't free our sacrifice or guilt.

Once again, I find myself asking big questions. How do we integrate spirituality and compassion and intimacy with our commitment to politics when there seems to be so little time? And don't we all we all need time, time to pay attention to each other, to our own aging? Can we have inter-generational conversations about these questions? Are we afraid of what we might find out?

A few days later in the visit, I drove with Jed and Danielle to La Jolla, an upscale beach community. Danielle and I wandered into a store. I picked out a skirt and blouse and looked in the mirror to see the person staring back at me looking like some faded version of my earlier self.

"Do you think this makes me look, well, old and a little too hippy?" I asked Danielle as I modeled the skirt in front of the store's discreetly placed mirror.

"You're not old, and you're certainly not hippy," she replied.

"No, I'm just an old hippy!"

"Well, that is true," she laughed. "But that works for you, doesn't it?" referring to the skirt.

"And so does the label," I added.

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